Tomorrow I travel to California for my son's college graduation.  It is a bittersweet moment.  I'm happy for him to be able to step into the world, I'm pleased for him to have fresh opportunity to shape his destiny, I'm joyful for what awaits him, for the many hopes and dreams he will pursue.  However, as I suspect most parents of children in this situation do, I also fear for him.  Although I have no doubt that he will make his way in good form, I nonetheless fear for him.  I fear for his safety, I fear for his livelihood, I fear for his person.  How could I not?  I've watched him from the day he was born.
     It is of course too easy to say that, as many people of faith do, God will take care of him, that God will ensure that he finds his way.  Though I do not dispute that God is, as he is in all of our lives, working in my son's life, that he is steadfastly active in all that he does, I always wonder:  how does he do it?
     This is a mystery I hope no one ever thinks--or pretends to think--he or she can unravel.  Those of us who invest in a living and personal God walk in a tension, a tension that runs through everything about our existence.  We believe God is there, we believe he is active, but we in no way will ever know, fully and precisely, how he is doing so today. Yes, when Jesus walked on the planet we caught a foretaste of it, but never the full picture. This side of eternity we never will.
     But that's OK.  Whether we find the mystery of existence in the hidden purposes of God or in the unfathomability of the cosmos, we remain in awe of what we will never understand fully.  As I consider this in light of my son's pending entrance into the "big, bad world," I realize anew the futility of human speculation on what will come.  All I know and believe that God is there, present, active, and expressing himself in profoundly remarkable love, the love that moves, as medieval writer Dante Alighieri writes in his Divine Comedy, his imagined journey through the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, "the sun and moon and stars."  God's love is all.
     Because I'll be traveling, I will not be posting again until later next week.  Thanks for reading!

     Are we at the end of the world?  As I continue to weep over the tragedy of the earthquake in Nepal, I occasionally think of the many points in the New Testament in which Jesus describes what humanity can expect as this present age draws to a close. There will be wars and earthquakes, he says, and signs and wonders in the sky, along with widespread discord, famine, disease, and social strife.
     Does not this sound, however, like what has been happening on the planet for untold centuries? Though many believers, regardless of the era or time in which they live, want to think that theirs is the one in which history as we know it will draw to a close, we should all think again.  Writing in the oppressive and often debauched and corrupted shadow of the Roman Empire, those who composed the New Testament perhaps had every reason to think that the Parousia (Jesus' return) was imminent.  How much more, they reasoned, could the world take?
     Quite a bit more, it seems.  The planet is highly resilient, as are human beings.  And the universe even more so.  It will likely be around for billions and billions more years. Frankly, I'm not eager for the end.  Every person on this planet has more to give, and many of them may well birth other people with even more to give.  Would we not rather see greater growth in human harmony, harmony with each other as well as with God, that will accrue to everyone's benefit than to abruptly end it all? 
     Long for God, yes, but long for the people and planet he has made, too.  How good is God if humanity destroys itself?

KEEP PRAYING FOR THE PEOPLE OF NEPAL

     By now, you have probably seen or heard the news reports about the massive earthquake that rocked the little nation of Nepal.  In every way, it is a tragedy of immense proportions.  Thousands dead, many more thousands injured and/or left homeless, venerable and ancient buildings reduced to rubble, screaming and pain continuing to fill the streets:  how can one measure such horror?
     As a lover of mountains, I've always felt close to Nepal.  As you may know, it houses the highest peak on the planet (Mt. Everest), along with numerous other 8,000 meter mountains (8,000 meters is considered to be the standard height for the loftiest peaks on the globe; there are fourteen of them.  Many people have climbed all of them).  As a result, each year literally thousands of mountaineers enter Nepal in search of alpine adventure. All who do find it.  Tragically, some never return.
     Among the many aftershocks that rippled through the region were some that shook numerous avalanches loose on Mt. Everest.  Seventeen climbers died, including a number of Sherpas (those whom Western climbers pay to ferry the heaviest loads up the mountain).  Many more were injured, some severely.
     The irony here is that the mountaineers, all of whom possessed the best climbing equipment that money could buy and who, more so than native Nepalese, were prepared to weather most geological downturns, will be able to return, fairly easily, to their native lands, relatively intact.  Their Nepalese helpers and assorted friends will not be so fortunate.  I hope the Westerners are doing their level best to stay and help.  They are surely better fed and have access to better medical care than the natives.
     We of the West tend to make the world our playground.  We come, we go, then come and go elsewhere, over and over again, while the rest of the world remains as it always was.  Nothing changes for us, yet everything changes for those who live in the nations we visit.  I hope that as we journey overseas in search of greater outing and meaning, we can be freshly cognizant that ours is a privilege that, whether occasioned by politics, economics, or religion, demands our utmost humility and grace.
     Did not Jesus give up everything he had, and was, for us?

     Also:  PLEASE PRAY FOR THE PEOPLE OF NEPAL!
     

     Are we all searching for something?  In my monthly atheist discussion group last week, almost everyone agreed that we are.  Almost everyone agreed that we all face some deeply fundamental questions, questions about ourselves and our world that our best science cannot answer.  These questions, almost everyone averred, have to do with, gasp, the metaphysical, some level of mystery that seems, gasp again, to exceed the boundaries of our humanness.  As one person remarked, "That I long so much to know the answers to these questions must mean that there is something out there to know."

     So the larger question becomes this:  what is "out there?"  One, who identified herself not as merely an atheist, but rather an anti-theist, insisted that everything about our quest can be explained by the nature of our brain.  Be it quest or answer, it is nothing more than a shift in our brain state.  There is nothing metaphysical about it.

     While I do not dispute that brain states explain a great deal about the source and direction of our longings, I find it disingenuous to attribute everything--everything--about them to a twist or nuance of the chemicals that run through our brains.  Synapse exchanges tells us a great deal, yes, but they do not tell us why--in the most absolute sense--we long.  They do not tell us why we are moral creatures.  They do not tell us why we long for value, and why we long for meaning.  They do not explain why the desire for meaning seems to afflict, in the most profound and challenging sense, every human being.

     In other words, social adaptation and evolutionary processes notwithstanding, why do we think there must be something else?

     Today is Earth Day.  Commemorated by environmentalists and like minded individuals the world over, Earth Day, established in 1970, marks a time of exhortation, admonition, and celebration in regard to one theme:  the care of the planet.  It's a day on which we think anew about the fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through the vast, vast universe.  Earth Day is a call to devote more time and greater passion to attending to the ecological balance of the world.
    Of course, many deride Earth Day.  They alternately claim that the planet is ours to exploit, that the future is ours and no one else's, that the environmental degradation that allegedly plagues the planet is not nearly as severe as some assert, or that the world is far more adaptable than we suppose and that our "puny" machinations upon it do little long term damage.  Opposition to Earth Day is a curious mix of religion, economics, and politics.  It draws from all corners of the human spectrum.
     Underlying it all, however, is human arrogance.  People who dissent from the themes of Earth Day do so ultimately because whether they know it or not, they are assuming that they, and only they are the most important things on the planet.  They assume that nothing is more important than the human's "right" and capacity to fulfill his or her own needs above, in absolute fashion, all else.  The human being is unquestionably number one, they say, and nothing that we do or do not do ought to deny this:  our desires reign supreme.
     Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image that when he noticed himself reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
     Regardless of where we stand religiously or politically, we really cannot dispute the essential truth of this story.  We are living in a world which we in no way made and in which we will in no way control fully.  Ecce homo:  we are only human.  If we think otherwise, the world will drown us, metaphorically for sure, in actuality perhaps, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
     As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all in it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

    As a person who grew up in California, filling my childhood with happy times playing on the seashore and camping and hiking in the many mountain ranges that dapple the state, I found the recent passing of Ivan Doig of particular note.  A long time resident of Montana, Doig is most famous for his 1975 memoir, House of Sky.  In almost lyrical fashion, House of Sky recounts and describes a childhood spent learning about the West and the countless possibilities for adventure and meaning it holds.  It is a paean to the wildness and openness of the Western landscape.
     Montana, Doig's chosen state, seems made to "be" the West.  Its license plates proclaim it to be "Big Sky Country," and it really is.  Driving through the vastness of the state, one comes to see that Montana's sky really is "big," and that the person who composed "America the Beautiful" seems to have written it with Montana in mind.
     I'm not trying to elevate Montana to the top of the American state pantheon (although it clearly contains much remarkable beauty), but rather to make a larger point.  That is, regardless of where one lives in the U.S., the West has always held an allure for them, calling, beckoning, and promising experiences one would not find anywhere else in the States.  It speaks of enormity, it speaks of expanse; it presents life as much bigger than it might otherwise be.
     When I return to California, as I try to do with some regularity, and stand before the ocean, stunned, as always, by the depth and breadth of the open sea, I ever realize that life is more, much more than we imagine it to be.  I realize anew that whether one believes in God or not, he or she cannot help but be overwhelmed by the unfathomable nature of existence.  What is it?  Where did it come from?  What does it mean?
     In truth, if there is a God, existence is explained.  If there is not a God, existence is everything--but totally unexplained--a wondrous experience, like the openness of the West, yet an experience without any inkling of what it really is.

     "To write poetry after the Holocaust," suggested the French philosopher Theodor Adorno, "is barbaric."  As I continue to reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day, about which I blogged on Friday, I see ever more fully Adorno's point.  In light of the Holocaust's devaluation of everything human, moral, and real, why should we think we can write anything of emotional value on its other side?  We have every reason to suppose that we can instead do only the opposite, to wallow ever more deeply in the aching shoals of human brokenness, our hope shattered completely, our vision fractured totally.  As T.S. Eliot asked near the beginning of his profoundly insightful Wasteland, itself written in the shadow of the horrors of World War I, "Wo weilest du?" ("Where will you go?").
     Indeed:  where will we go?  Though we are traveling through an ethical nothingness, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once observed, we do so before a vast "somethingness" of nearly unlimited potential.  We travel before God.  This God, however, Kierkegaard went on to say, is not obtainable by ordinary means.  We must make a leap of faith.  Yet this leap is not a leap of irrationality, he adds, but a leap into an "objective uncertainty."
     Objective uncertainty?  It seems an oxymoron.  But it's not.  Kierkegaard's point, were he living during the Holocaust, would be that we will never be able to fully contemplate or grasp the horrors of what our twentieth century eyes have seen.  We will never be able to fully understand why, we will never be able to fully understand the "why" of God during the Holocaust.  Yet we believe that over and beyond the angst and horror, God is there. There is object.  There is something.  There is foundation. There is meaning.
     Is this meaning elusive?  Yes.  Can this meaning be oblique?  Yes.  But it's there.  And in this, and only in this, is our hope.  Otherwise, we are hoping in the very humanness that birthed our angst.

     Yesterday was a day which all of us, here, there, and everywhere, should remember. Why?  It was Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Coupled with next week's commemoration of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, Holocaust Day forces us to confront the tragic legacy of human evil.  Are we really evil?  Are we really inherently bad?
     No, we are not.  But many of us do very evil things, things that often strain the imagination, so horrific are they, so mindbogglingly indifferent to human worth and dignity they evince themselves to be.  We frequently find them incomprehensible.
     Yet humanity keeps going, keeps trucking across the planet, evil, horror, and all. Why? Well, why not?  Despite all that we do, we remain valuable creatures, valuable not because we deem ourselves to be, and valuable not because we feel ourselves capable of knowing genuine right and wrong, but valuable because we and this planet have been created with order, beauty, and purpose,  We have been made, not concocted; designed, not erupting into existence.  Were this not true, we would really have no basis to call good "good," and evil "evil."  In a world without explainable reason for being, how could we?
     We mourn with our Jewish brethren, we weep with our Armenian friends.  And we rejoice that we are human beings.  We rejoice that God loves us, that God made us, and that, in the person of Jesus, God became one of us.

     If you've been around for a while, you've probably heard of Kurt Cobain.  Once the lead singer for the rock band Nirvana (the term for the Buddhist afterlife), Cobain, tragically, took his own life about twenty-one years ago this year, ending his too brief earthly existence in a room above his Seattle garage.  The musical world mourned his passing greatly, and continues to do so today.  Like John Lennon, whose passing made us ponder the import of the Sixties and Seventies more deeply, Cobain and his premature demise led us to meditate more fully on the state of the world in the Nineties and beyond.  His was a raw sound, but it captured the angst that so many felt, the angst of feeling helpless before waves of societal upheaval and change, of trembling at the emptiness of a world that had become too focused on enriching itself at the expense of, ironically, itself.
     Now, a film about Cobain is set to be released.  It will enlighten us even more about him, I'm sure, yet I suspect it will also cause us to think more about what he left behind. In particular, I think about his daughter Frances who, at the time of her father's death was only twenty months old.  What a legacy she must confront, what a melange of wondering and emotion with which she must deal.  Yet as she indicated in a recent interview in Rolling Stone, she intends to be her own person going forward.  And why not? We cannot remain captives of our past indefinitely.
     Whatever your past may be, I trust that you find the resources to remember it while seeking to exceed it.  Like religion, which calls us to remember tradition, yet also invites us to look at these traditions in new ways beyond them, and like rock music, which, while remaining itself, will be constantly reinterpreted in countless new ways (look at former Nirvana member Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters), we all owe ourselves, and God, to believe in the inexhaustibility of creation, the limitlessness of potential, the newness that lilts at every turn.  One day of course the world will be no more, it and its past forever gone.  Ensconced in God's eternity, however, its hope will carry on.
     The past fades, the present comes, but newness will never end.

     For the first twelve days of each month, I try to read one chapter of the Hebrew Bible's Ecclesiastes (it contains twelve chapters).  Highly enigmatic yet singularly profound, Ecclesiastes presents much wisdom from which all of us, regardless of our religious or spiritual loyalties, can profit.

     A few days ago, I read chapter twelve.  It opens with a meditation on the decline and end of existence, individual or corporate, and the social ennui and cultural alienation which often accompany it.  At one point, I was reminded of the world portrayed in Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road.  You may already know that McCarthy's novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men) tend to be rather dark, and The Road is no exception.  It presents a world in the aftermath of what we might assume is a nuclear holocaust, a world of desolation and utter lawlessness.  It is a world in which, literally, every person is for him or herself.

     Death, whether big or small, tends to do that.  Death levels every existence.  It regards nothing as sacrosanct or sacred.  And it does so without any boundaries.  Death can do whatever it wants, and no one, absolutely no one, can stop it.

     Now the reader at this point may expect me to mention the resurrection, that God is master of death, and we ultimately need not worry about its consequences.  While all this is true, I cite Ecclesiastes and The Road to say although death presents an incomprehensible image of human demise, its bigger point is that life is as full of ends as it is beginnings.  Things begin, things end.  And we do not always know why.

     It's a beautiful and broken world.  How are we to deal with this paradox?  
     We admit that its ultimate explanation is not our own.

     As one who once climbed mountains throughout North America, I am always struck by the passing of a mountaineer.  So it was that I read recently of the death of Malli Mastan Babu, India's finest and most famous mountaineer.  Babu had been missing in South America's Andes Mountains since March; an April expedition happened upon his body, covered with snow.  He was only forty years old.
     Babu is most well known for his remarkable speed of ascent.  In the space of less than six months, he scaled the highest peak on all seven continents, a feat that other mountaineers often took years to accomplish.  No one could keep up with him, which was why he usually climbed alone.
     What I found particularly poignant about Babu's passing is that according to news reports, a bag found with his body contained a copy of the Baghavad Gita, part of Hinduism's most famous epic, the Mahabharata and, in its own right, one of Hinduism's most beloved vedas, or scriptures.  Translated from the Sanskrit, Baghavad Gita means "Song of God."
     I think of John Muir, the famous American backpacker and mountaineer and founder of the Sierra Club, and who, like Babu, yet in his own tradition, read the Bible (he grew up in the Scottish Presbyterian Church) and penned highly lyrical meditations about seeing God in the wilderness.  Two people, two traditions, but the motivation remained the same:  to experience the creator.
     Mountains speak powerfully of God, God as creator, redeemer, and friend.  So does life.  Are you listening?

     A few days ago, my wife and I reminded ourselves that April 11 marked what would have been her mother's 94th birthday.  A lovely and deeply caring woman, Helen was a beautiful picture of a human being.  Though her immediate world was small (she lived most her life in a little farming town in southwest Arkansas), and her purview blissfully absent of the political and social machinations which seem to trouble so many of us, Helen did her best to love everyone whom she came across, regardless of who or what they were.
     Many decades ago, when my wife and I were getting to know each other, I hitchhiked from rural Texas into her parents' little town to visit.  Although I doubt the town had ever seen a hitchhiker before (!), that didn't stop Helen from extending her most gracious hospitality to me in the course of my time there.  I'll not forget that week.
     As I view the larger world today, I see that we can all learn from being hospitable, in every way.  So many of us try so hard to look after ourselves, expending every effort to carve out our little niche of happiness in this existence, always seeking to maximize ourselves above all.  It's rather Darwinian, really, and I sometimes wonder why, as social science wants to think, humanity ever decided that cooperation was to be preferred over antagonism.  We all want "our" own.
     This is why Jesus' life is so startling.  As he said, "I did not come to be served, but to serve, and give my life as a ransom for many."  Jesus' words present the precise opposite of how most humans frame their lives.  Not that we should not be concerned for ourselves and our loved ones, but that we should remember that because in Jesus, God's love has truly been loosed in this universe, we should be entirely comfortable sharing love and life without worrying unduly about whether we will enjoy them, too.  God's love is endless.
     Thanks, Helen.

     While traveling last week, I found time to read George Elliot's Middlemarch.  It reminded me of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as well as the currently popular PBS series, Downton Abbey.  All three of these works portray worlds that at first glance seem very far removed from our own, but if we examine them more closely, we see that they are in fact not significantly different.  They present people who, like all of us, are simply trying to make sense of and deal with the realities they face each day.  They give us telling and realistic pictures of the human condition.
     So much of life is indeed rather ordinary and bland, a series of routines and commitments, seemingly endless rivers of challenge and responsibility.  We often search long and hard for a higher plane of experience, a break from the normal, an inroad into the distinctive and unique.  The people of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Downtoon Abbey were doing the same.  We all look for a greater meaning.
     Extraordinary meaning, meaning that rocks our world, however, rarely emerges from ordinary circumstances.  Extraordinary meaning demands extraordinary origins, origins that are not dependent on ordinary circumstances.  It bursts boundaries, shatters categories.  It takes life apart.
     This is a crucial point.  As the characters of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Downton Abbey learned, however much life takes itself apart, it still remains life.  Only when life is taken apart will it genuinely change.
     So did Jesus say to Nicodemus when the inquisitive Pharisee asked Jesus how he could experience God more fully:  "You must be born again."
     Put another way, you must believe in the one who can see everything if you wish to see--really see--anything.
     

     What's your place?  I ask because I recently reread German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's soliloquy on the death of God.  Writing, in his The Gay Science, and adopting the guise of a "madman," Nietzsche asks, "Whither is God?  I will tell you.  We have killed him--you and I" [italics Nietzsche].  And, he adds, "Whither are we moving? . . . Are we not plunging continually? . . . Is there still any up or down?  Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?  Do we not feel the breath of empty space?  As it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?"
     Any death creates a space, a gap, however large or small, in the fabric of existence.  A death is a tear in the tapestry of reality.  It shrinks the world; it makes it less complete. Given how most of us define God, that is, as an extraordinarily large and powerful being, the death of God would therefore produce an enormous hole in the universe.  We would feel colder, we would feel emptier, we would feel as if "night" were "continually closing in on us."  We would be alone in a way that we probably cannot presently imagine.
     Put another way, we would no longer have a place.  Sure, we would continue to exist, and sure, we would continue to do what we enjoy doing, and sure, we would continue to die.  Why would we not?  But we would do all these things in a world, and cosmos, that are no more than space, excruciatingly dead and empty space, no rhyme, no reason, no point as to why they, or we, should be here.
     Succinctly and cogently, Nietzsche stumbled onto a painful and difficult truth:  space will never be place.
     What's your place?

     Yesterday, we talked about the Romantics and the resurrection.  Today, as I continue to contemplate how the idea of resurrection, whether we believe Jesus' resurrection happened or not, nonetheless ripples through our lives, I wonder, as I always do, why.  Why does the notion of resurrection so capture our senses, our hopes, our dreams?  Why do we so much long for a new beginning, a beginning that seems to rise, like a miracle, out of the old?  Why are we creatures who wish for another day?
     Of all the animals, we are the only ones who grasp the presence of mortality.  Of all the animals, we are the only ones who understand that life is more than life, that to live means also to die.  We understand the notion of nothingness.
     And nothingness is, as many existentialists have observed, a path to somethingness, a somethingness that bequeaths a powerful newness, a newnesss of deeper life and richer meaning.
     In the absolute nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, the greatest of all somethingnesses arose, a somethingness that eclipses all others, a somethingness that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time:  the resurrection.
     The resurrection is nonsensical, radical, unbelievable, and unfathomable, but it solves humanity's greatest puzzle:  why does life have meaning?

     As I was traveling last week, I didn't get opportunity to take note of April 1 which, in addition to being, in many parts of the world, April Fools Day, is the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work expresses a blending of intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, aptly capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination, the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness.  It takes us to the peaks of ecstasy, and drags us through the darkest nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be as real as anything can possibly be.
     One of Rachmaninoff's closest associates was another Russian pianist, the incomparable Vladimir Horowitz.  In 1987, at the age of 82, Horowitz returned to Soviet Russia to perform, the first time he had been back since he had emigrated many years before.  He, too, made his audience swoon with the force and potency of his piano, demonstrating to us once more that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is as we, romantic and emotional creatures that we are, we who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we who today bask in the light of Easter, we realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we ultimately make our biggest decisions with our heart.  As Paul says in Romans 10, we believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, that Jesus died and rose, but we trust it with our heart.
     Long live the Romantics.

     As we reflect on Easter today, some of us may be asking whether the resurrection is, as some of my atheist friends have told me, parochial.  Is it really so small and insignificant that it affects only a very small corner of an infinitely large universe?  Is one itinerant Jewish preacher's return from death really that important?
     If the resurrection happened, it's vastly important.  Why?  It tells us that this vast universe is the creation, in some way, of a personal being.  Only a personal being can cause another personal being to rise from the dead; impersonal things have no power over anything.  A personal creator being ensures that the fabric of the cosmos is more than its parts.  It is a work of eternity.
     In this light, the resurrection becomes anything but parochial.  The resurrection means that life is more than itself, that life as we know and love it is not all there is to experience.  There is more to life than meets the eye.  Or the ear.  Or the heart.  The resurrection means that this present is only the work of a far greater present still, a present that will never end.
     As Jesus told Martha in John 11, "He who believes in me will live even if he dies.  And he who believes in me will never die."
     Death is not the end.

     Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.  Most of us know how Jesus would, in a few short hours, demonstrate his words in tangible form by dying on a Roman cross for, as he had long proclaimed he would do, all humanity, billions and billions of people, people who had already lived and died, people who were living, people who had not yet even been born.  Most of us know that this man Jesus, God in the flesh, gave himself so that we could find forgiveness of our sins and eternal life, an abundant life in the present moment and, when our days draw to a close, life forevermore.  Most of us know that because Jesus died, life is more than living, dying, and no more.
      Not as many of us, however, know about Maximilian Kolbe who, in his own way, did exactly the same thing.
     Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at one of the most notorious of the German concentration camps, Auschwitz.  In an act of selfless sacrifice that will be remembered for many ages to come, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.
     Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  He willingly and happily died for another human being. As did Jesus for us.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred of days, the day on which Jesus, the son of God and God in the flesh, sacrificed himself, giving everything he was for the world that he had made, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?
     The answer is very simple:  a God who loves us.